The Amazing Ingenuity of Protein Folding

No creation oriented ministry has ever spotted the proof of ingenious design in the protein folding capability in DNA. Yet, there is the most irrefutable proof of ingenuity that exceeds what man can or could ever conceive. We can only describe the amazing processes we witness. I am hoping by highlighting it here that Christians will begin to call out scientists to explain how chance can accomplish these feats ... by any plausible explanation.

Science News Effuses Over One Aspect of DNA Folding

Protein folding of DNA strands is the folding of proteins to create useful shapes in the cell that operate as tools, trucks, pulleys, etc.

The DNA itself is so densely packed from which this folding begins, we see a folding ingenuity that precedes the protein folding that follows. In the December 29, 2014 article online at sciencenews.org entitled The Art of DNA Folding: How to Stuff 2 Meters of DNA into a Nucleas, we read:

If packing a vacation’s worth of clothes into a small carry-on bag seems daunting, consider a cell’s task. Nearly every cell in the body carries 6 billion DNA base pairs. When stretched out, the DNA would extend about two meters. Cells must compress all that genetic material into a nucleus that measures only about 5 micrometers across. That’s like packing a thread the length of two football fields into a sphere no wider than the point of a pin.

To accomplish the feat, cells make loops in the DNA. Scientists used to think there must be hundreds of thousands or even millions of loops, but a new study shows that there are only about 10,000 nonoverlapping loops in each cell. Each loop (gray, top left) is anchored by small stretches of DNA (black) where proteins called transcription factors bind (blue, middle left). The loop crumples into a blob and gets coated with one of several chemical tags (red, orange and green, bottom left) that tell the cell whether to turn genes on or off.

Coated loops group together in subcompartments with other loops bearing the same coating, a team including structural biologist Suhas Rao of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and computational biologist Miriam Huntley of Harvard University report in the Dec. 18 Cell.

A computer simulation shows one way a stretch of 5 million DNA bases may fold inside the nucleus. Each type of cell may pack the DNA slightly differently, much the way an origami artist can fold a piece of paper into many shapes.

You can watch the video linked to the article at this YouTube entitled A 3D Map of Human Genome. The video is interesting in that it notes that the DNA content is not randomly distributed, but is folded at markers into loops, and then these are segregated by domains.